It took six men to pull
a 13-foot, 9-inch alligator from Lake Eufaula in Alabama. The animal
weighed in at 920 pounds at a local lumber yard in mid-August, but its
girth is only now raising eyebrows and drawing gasps; it was weighed
last week but started to draw national attention Tuesday.

The
giant male gator is one of several monsters that were hauled out of
waters during regulated hunts in Alabama, Texas and Florida in recent
years, and some biologists question whether that’s a good thingBig
dominant males manage the habitat where they reside, keeping smaller,
more aggressive males away.

“You
move one animal and four or five or six smaller gators come in and fight
for territory,” said Kent Vliet, an alligator biologist at the
University of Florida.. “It is a bit destabilizing in that sense.”Vliet said alligator hunters should be encouraged to snag younger males to manage populations and leave the behemoths alone.

“In
my mind, because so few alligators that hatch reach adult size, and
even fewer reach full bull status, I think of those animals as being
very valuable,” said Vliet, coordinator of the university’s laboratory
in the biology department. “A lot of ecological resources have gone into
making that animal. To me that’s sort of a waste.”

Humans don’t hunt that way.

[New study shows just what vicious predators humans really are]
They
want the big game, the big trophy, a place in the record books. Scott
Evans, of Center Point, and his friends, brothers Jeff and Justin Gregg,
achieved that in some regard, capturing the biggest gator ever in that
particular lake.
But as gators go, this beast was no state or
national record. The largest alligator ever caught in the wild was a
15-foot, 9-inch giant wrangled last year in a tributary to the Alabama
River.
More than likely, the world record 1,011-pound male
would have dominated the more recent catch in Lake Eufaula. He probably
wouldn’t have allowed him in his territory, and in the unlikely event
that he did, he definitely wouldn’t have allowed him to approach females
during the April to May breeding season, Vliet said.

An
alligator is seen in the water as Secretary of the Interior Sally
Jewell visits the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife
Refuge in the Everglades. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The
second largest catch, a 14-foot, 8-inch gator roped and drowned by
Thomas Bass of Trinity, Tex., held the record until Mandy Stokes and a
group of helpers made news with their catch last year. Bass caught his
gator eight years ago, but wasn’t entered into the record kept by Safari
Club International until last year.

Robert “Tres” Ammerman, a
licensed practical nurse from Apopka, caught a skinny 14-foot, 3-inch
male that weighed 654 pounds, in Lake Washington in 2010. It was the
longest documented gator caught in Florida, according to the state Fish
and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Florida
is renowned for alligators, which serve as the mascot for the state’s
largest university, but the animals range the entire length of the Gulf
Coast. They are also found in the Carolinas.The American
alligator is classified as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, a listing that provides federal protection, But state approved
management and control efforts are allowed under the designation.

Louisiana
and Florida have the largest habitats, but the populations are rapidly
growing in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, Vliet said. With smaller
habitats in the latter three states, population management programs were
slower to start.

“Because they delayed the annual harvest for so long, they’ve had some very big animals,” Vliet said.Removing
them makes headlines, but the news is not always good, especially when
no human has been harmed. “These are unusual animals. They have survived
a long time. They tend to be wary animals. They may be older animals.
It is likely that they do dominate an area, subordinate smaller males,
mate with multiple females,” Vliet said.“In
a lot of ways they control the alligator population in that area.
There’s no doubt in my mind that when you move an animal of this size,
it has an impact on the population.”

Darryl
Fears has worked at The Washington Post for more than a decade, mostly
as a reporter on the National staff. He currently covers the environment, focusing on the Chesapeake Bay and issues affecting wildlife.

New study shows just what vicious predators humans really are

Unlike other predators, humans go for the biggest fish -- and that might be a big mistake. (Guillaume Mazille)

Reminder: We're the worst.Recent news coverage of big game hunting
has only highlighted what we already knew: Humans are some pretty
ferocious predators. A new study shows just how unique humans are in
their killing tendencies, and it highlights an unexpected twist. It
turns out that our biggest problem may be that we target fully grown
animals instead of their young.
The study, published Thursday in Science,
looked at data on how different predators in the animal kingdom behave.
Humans, the study found, prey on other large carnivores at nine times
the rate that those large carnivores prey on one another. And we target
adults in their reproductive prime much more than is natural in the
animal kingdom.[Here are the animals that actually benefit from human hunting]
"Our
wickedly efficient killing technology, global economic systems and
resource management that prioritize short-term benefits to humanity have
given rise to the human super predator," lead study author Chris Darimont, the Hakai-Raincoast professor of geography at the University of Victoria, said in a statement. "Our impacts are as extreme as our behaviour and the planet bears the burden of our predatory dominance."
This
imbalance is most pronounced in fishing, Darimont and his colleagues
explained during a teleconference held by Science on Wednesday. Summary: (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6250/784)

Modern humans evolved as cooperative
hunter-gatherers whose cultural and technological evolution enabled them
to slay prey much larger than themselves, across many species groups.

One might think that those hunting skills have faded since the advent of
agriculture and animal husbandry almost 10,000 years ago. Yet, as
Darimont et al. show in a global analysis on page 858 of this issue (1),
we are still the unique superpredator that we evolved to be.

Analyzing
an extensive database of 2135 exploited wild animal populations, the
authors find that humans take up to 14 times as much adult prey biomass
as do other predators. Our trophic dominance is most pronounced outside
our own habitat, in the oceans (see the chart).

Darimont
et al. show that the rates at which humans exploit land mammals and
marine fish vastly exceeds the impacts of other predators (1). Marine
fish experience "fishing through marine food webs," with different
trophic groups similarly affected. In contrast, on land top predators
are exploited at much higher rates than are herbivores. (P.
Huey/Science)

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade
Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous
cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.

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About Me

Jennifer believes we live in the garden of Eden and I believe that we are destroying it. Our saving grace is within ourselves, our faith, and our mindfulness. We need to make a conscious effort to respect and preserve all life.